OTHER  WORKS  OF 

WILLIAM   BUTLEE  YEATS 

Poems  and  Plats,  2  volumes: 
I  — Lyrics.    $2.00. 
n  —  Dramatic  Poems.    $2.00. 

The  Celtic  Twilight.    $1.50. 

Ideas  of  Good  and  Evil.    $1.50. 

Stories  of  Red  Hanrahan.    $1.25. 

Reveries  over  Childhood  and  Youth.    Illus- 
trated.   $2.00. 

Responsibilities  and  Other  Poems.    $1.26. 

The  Tables  of  the  Law.    $1.25. 

The  Hour  Glass  and  Other  Plays.    $1.25. 

The  Green  Helmet  and  Other  Poems.   $1.25. 

The  Cutting  of  an  Agate.    $1.50. 

THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANT. 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 


SPECIAL 
LIMITED  EDITION 


PER   AMIGA 
SILENTIA  LUNAE 


BY 

WILLIAM  BUTLER  YEATS 


THE  MACMILLAN   COMPANY 

1918 

All  rights  reserved 


COPTKIGHT,    1918, 

By  the  MACMILLAN  COMPANY. 


Set  up  and  electrotyped.    Published  January,  1918. 


Norfnooti  ^rt08 

J.  S.  Gushing  Co.  —  Berwick  &  Smith  Co. 

Norwood,  Mass.,  U.S.A. 


PROLOGUE 

My  Dear  "Maurice" — You  will  remember 
that  afternoon  in  Calvados  last  summer  when 
your  black  Persian  "  Minoulooshe,"  who  had 
walked  behind  us  for  a  good  mile,  heard  a 
wing  flutter  in  a  bramble-bush  ?  For  a  long 
time  we  called  her  endearing  names  in  vain. 
She  seemed  resolute  to  spend  her  night  among 
the  brambles.  She  had  interrupted  a  conver- 
sation, often  interrupted  before,  upon  certain 
thoughts  so  long  habitual  that  I  may  be  per- 
mitted to  call  them  my  convictions.  When  I 
came  back  to  London  my  mind  ran  again  and 
again  to  those  conversations  and  I  could  not 
rest  till  I  had  written  out  in  this  little  book 
all  that  I  had  said  or  would  have  said.  Read 
it  some  day  when  "Minoulooshe"  is  asleep. 

W.  B.  YEATS. 

May  11,  1917. 


r^f^7n42 


EGO  DOMINUS  TUUS 

Hic 

On  the  grey  sand  beside  the  shallow  stream, 
Under   your   old   wind-beaten   tower,   where 

still 
A  lamp  burns  on  above  the  open  book 
That  Michael  Robartes  left,  you  walk  in  the 

moon. 
And,   though  you  have  passed  the  best  of 

life,  still  trace. 
Enthralled   by   the   imconquerable   delusion, 
Magical  shapes. 

Ille 

By  the  help  of  an  image 
I  call  to  my  own  opposite,  summon  all 
That  I  have  handled  least,  least  looked  upon. 
9 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

Hic 
And  I  would  find  myself  and  not  an  image. 

Ille 
That  is  our  modern  hope,  and  by  its  light 
We  have  lit  upon  the  gentle,  sensitive  mind 
And  lost  the  old  nonchalance  of  the  hand; 
Whether    we    have    chosen    chisel,    pen,    or 

brush. 
We  are  but  critics,  or  but  half  create,     "^^ 
Timid,  entangled,  empty,  and  abashed. 
Lacking  the  countenance  of  our  friends. 

Hic 

And  yet, 
The  chief  imagination  of  Christendom, 
Dante  Alighieri,  so  utterly  found  himself. 
That  he  has  made  that  hollow  face  of  his 
More  plain  to  the  mind's  eye  than  any  face 
But  that  of  Christ. 

10 


EGO  DOMINUS  TUUS 

Ille 

And  did  he  find  himself, 
Or  was  the  hunger  that  had  made  it  hollow 
A  hunger  for  the  apple  on  the  bough 
Most    out    of    reach?     And  is  that  spectral 

image 
The  man  that  Lapo  and  that  Guido  knew  ? 
I  think  he  fashioned  from  his  opposite 
An   image   that   might    have    been   a   stony- 
face, 
Staring  upon  a  Beduin's  horse-hair  roof, 
From  doored  and  windowed  cliff,  or  half  up- 
turned 
Among  the  coarse  grass  arid  the  camel  dung. 
He  set  his  chisel  to  the  hardest  stone ; 
Being   mocked   by   Guido   for  his   lecherous 

life, 
Derided  and  deriding,  driven  out 
To  climb  that  stair  and  eat  that  bitter  bread, 
11 


PER  AMIGA   SILENTIA  LUNAE 

He    found    the    unpersuadable    justice,    he 

found 
The  most  exalted  lady  loved  by  a  man. 

Hic 
Yet  surely  there  are  men  who  have  made  their 

art 
Out  of  no  tragic  war ;  lovers  of  life, 
Impulsive  men,  that  look  for  happiness, 
And  sing  when  they  have  found  it. 

Ille 

No,  not  sing. 
For  those  that  love  the  world   serve  it  in 

action, 
Grow  rich,  popular,  and  full  of  influence ; 
And   should   they  paint  or  write   still  is  it 

action. 
The  struggle  of  the  fly  in  marmalade. 
The  rhetorician  would  deceive  his  neighbours, 
12 


EGO  DOMINUS  TUUS 

The  sentimentalist  himself ;  while  art 

Is  but  a  vision  of  reality. 

What   portion   in   the   world   can   the   artist 

have, 
Who  has  awakened  from  the  common  dream. 
But  dissipation  and  despair? 

Hic 

And  yet, 

No  one  denies  to  Keats  love  of  the  world. 
Remember  his  deliberate  happiness. 

Ille 
His  art  is  happy,  but  who  knows  his  mind  ? 
I  see  a  schoolboy,  when  I  think  of  him. 
With  face  and  nose  pressed  to  a  sweetshop 

window, 
For  certainly  he  sank  into  his  grave, 
His  senses  and  his  heart  unsatisfied ; 
And   made  —  being   poor,    ailing   and   igno- 
rant, 

13 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

Shut  out  from  all  the  luxury  of  the  world, 
The  ill-bred  son  of  a  livery  stable  keeper  — 
Luxuriant  song. 

Hic 
Why  should  you  leave  the  lamp 
Burning  alone  beside  an  open  book, 
And  trace  these  characters  upon  the  sand  ? 
A  style  is  found  by  sedentary  toil, 
And  by  the  imitation  of  great  masters. 

Ille 
Because  I  seek  an  image,  not  a  book ; 
Those  men  that  in  their  writings  are  most 

wise 
Own    nothing    but    their    blind,     stupefied 

hearts. 
I  call  to  the  mysterious  one  who  yet 
Shall  walk  the  wet  sand  by  the  water's  edge, 
And  look  most  like  me,   being  indeed   my 

double, 

14 


EGO  DOMINUS  TUUS 

And  prove  of  all  imaginable  things 
The  most  unlike,  being  my  anti-self. 
And,  standing  by  these  characters,  disclose 
All  that  I  seek ;  and  whisper  it  as  though 
He  were  afraid  the  birds,  who  cry  aloud 
Their  momentary  cries  before  it  is  dawn, 
Would  carry  it  away  to  blasphemous  men. 

December  1916. 


15 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 
ANIMA  HOMINIS 


When  I  come  home  after  meeting  men  who 
are  strange  to  me,  and  sometimes  even 
after  talking  to  women,  I  go  over  all  I  have 
said  in  gloom  and  disappointment.  Per- 
haps I  have  overstated  everything  from  a 
desire  to  vex  or  startle,  from  hostility  that 
is  but  fear ;  or  all  my  natural  thoughts  have 
been  drowned  by  an  undisciplined  sympa- 
thy. My  fellow-diners  have  hardly  seemed 
of  mixed  humanity,  and  how  should  I  keep 
my  head  among  images  of  good  and  evil, 
crude  allegories. 

c  17 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

But  when  I  shut  my  door  and  Hght  the 
candle,  I  invite  a  Marmorean  Muse,  an  art, 
where  no  thought  or  emotion  has  come  to 
mind  because  another  man  has  thought  or 
felt  something  different,  for  now  there  must 
be  no  reaction,  action  only,  and  the  world 
must  move  my  heart  but  to  the  heart's  dis- 
/  covery  of  itself,  and  I  begin  to  dream  of  eye- 
lids that  do  not  quiver  before  the  bayonet: 
all  my  thoughts  have  ease  and  joy,  I  am 
all  virtue  and  confidence.  WTien  I  come  to 
put  in  rhyme  what  I  have  found  it  will 
be  a  hard  toil,  but  for  a  moment  I  be- 
lieve I  have  found  myself  and  not  my 
anti-self.  It  is  only  the  shrinking  from 
toil  perhaps  that  convinces  me  that  I 
have  been  no  more  myself  than  is  the 
cat  the  medicinal  grass  it  is  eating  in  the 
garden. 

How  could  I  have  mistaken  for  myself 
18 


ANIMA  HOMINIS 

an  heroic  condition  that  from  early  boy- 
hood has  made  me  superstitious?  That 
which  comes  as  complete,  as  minutely  or- 
ganised, as  are  those  elaborate,  brightly 
lighted  buildings  and  sceneries  appearing  in 
a  moment,  as  I  lie  between  sleeping  and 
waking,  must  come  from  above  me  and 
beyond  me.  At  times  I  remember  that 
place  in  Dante  where  he  sees  in  his  chamber 
the  "Lord  of  Terrible  Aspect,"  and  how, 
seeming  "to  rejoice  inwardly  that  it  was  a 
marvel  to  see,  speaking,  he  said,  many  things 
among  the  which  I  could  understand  but 
few,  and  of  these  this:  ego  dominus  tuus"; 
or  should  the  conditions  come,  not  as  it 
were  in  a  gesture  —  as  the  image  of  a  man  — 
but  in  some  fine  landscape,  it  is  of  Boehme, 
maybe,  that  I  think,  and  of  that  country 
where  we  "eternally  solace  ourselves  in  the 
excellent  beautiful  flourishing  of  all  manner 
19 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

of  flowers  and  forms,  both  trees  and  plants, 
and  all  kinds  of  fruit." 

II 

When  I  consider  the  minds  of  my  friends, 
among  artists  and  emotional  writers,  I  dis- 
cover a  like  contrast.  I  have  sometimes 
told  one  close  friend  that  her  only  fault  is 
a  habit  of  harsh  judgment  with  those  who 
have  not  her  sympathy,  and  she  has  written 
comedies  where  the  wickedest  people  seem 
but  bold  children.  She  does  not  know  why 
she  has  created  that  world  where  no  one  is 
ever  judged,  a  high  celebration  of  indulgence, 
but  to  me  it  seems  that  her  ideal  of  beauty 
is  the  compensating  dream  of  a  nature  wearied 
out  by  over-much  judgment.  I  know  a 
famous  actress  who  in  private  life  is  like  the 
captain  of  some  buccaneer  ship  holding  his 
crew  to  good  behaviour  at  the  mouth  of  a 
20 


ANIMA  HOMINIS 

blunderbuss,  and  upon  the  stage  she  excels 
in  the  representation  of  women  who  stir  to 
pity  and  to  desire  because  they  need  our 
protection,  and  is  most  adorable  as  one  of 
those  young  queens  imagined  by  Maeter- 
linck who  have  so  little  will,  so  little  self, 
that  they  are  like  shadows  sighing  at  the 
edge  of  the  world.  When  I  last  saw  her  in 
her  own  house  she  lived  in  a  torrent  of  words 
and  movements,  she  could  not  listen,  and 
all  about  her  upon  the  walls  were  women 
drawn  by  Burne- Jones  in  his  latest  period. 
She  had  invited  me  in  the  hope  that  I  would 
defend  those  women,  who  were  always  listen- 
ing, and  are  as  necessary  to  her  as  a  contem- 
plative Buddha  to  a  Japanese  Samurai, 
against  a  French  critic  who  would  persuade 
her  to  take  into  her  heart  in  their  stead  a 
Post-Impressionist  picture  of  a  fat,  ruddy, 
nude  woman  lying  upon  a  Turkey  carpet. 
21 


PER  AMIGA   SILENTIA  LUNAE 

There  are  indeed  certain  men  whose  art 
is  less  an  opposing  virtue  than  a  compen- 
sation for  some  accident  of  health  or  circum- 
stance. During  the  riots  over  the  first  pro- 
duction of  the  Playboy  of  the  Western  World 
Synge  was  confused,  without  clear  thought, 
and  was  soon  ill  —  indeed  the  strain  of  that 
week  may  perhaps  have  hastened  his  death 
—  and  he  was,  as  is  usual  with  gentle  and 
silent  men,  scrupulously  accurate  in  all  his 
statements.  In  his  art  he  made,  to  delight 
his  ear  and  his  mind's  eye,  voluble  dare- 
devils who  *'go  romancing  through  a  romp- 
ing lifetime  ...  to  the  dawning  of  the  Judg- 
ment Day."  At  other  moments  this  man, 
condemned  to  the  life  of  a  monk  by  bad 
health,  takes  an  amused  pleasure  in  "great 
queens  .  .  .  making  themselves  matches  from 
the  start  to  the  end."  Indeed,  in  all  his 
imagination  he  delights  in  fine  physical  life, 
22 


ANIMA  HOMINIS 

in  life  where  the  moon  pulls  up  the  tide. 
The  last  act  of  Deirdre  of  the  Sorrows,  where 
his  art  is  at  its  noblest,  was  written  upon 
his  death-bed.  He  was  not  sure  of  any 
world  to  come,  he  was  leaving  his  betrothed 
and  his  unwritten  play  —  "Oh,  what  a  waste 
of  time,"  he  said  to  me ;  he  hated  to  die,  and 
in  the  last  speeches  of  Deirdre  and  in  the 
middle  act  he  accepted  death  and  dismissed 
life  with  a  gracious  gesture.  He  gave  to 
Deirdre  the  emotion  that  seemed  to  him  most 
desirable,  most  diflBcult,  most  fitting,  and 
maybe  saw  in  those  delighted  seven  years, 
now  dwindling  from  her,  the  fulfilment  of 
his  own  life. 

Ill 

When  I  think  of  any  great  poetical  writer 
of  the  past  (a  realist  is  an  historian  and  ob- 
scures the  cleavage  by  the  record  of  his  eyes) 
23 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

I  comprehend,  if  I  know  the  lineaments  of  his 
life,  that  the  work  is  the  man's  flight  from 
his  entire  horoscope,  his  blind  struggle  in 
the  network  of  the  stars.  William  Morris, 
a  happy,  busy,  most  irascible  man,  described 
dim  colour  and  pensive  emotion,  following, 
beyond  any  man  of  his  time,  an  indolent 
muse;  while  Savage  Landor  topped  us  all 
in  calm  nobility  when  the  pen  was  in  his 
hand,  as  in  the  daily  violence  of  his  passion 
when  he  had  laid  it  down.  He  had  in  his 
Imaginary  Conversations  reminded  us,  as  it 
were,  that  the  Venus  de  Milo  is  a  stone,  and 
yet  he  wrote  when  the  copies  did  not  come 
from  the  printer  as  soon  as  he  expected:  "I 
have  .  .  .  had  the  resolution  to  tear  in  pieces 
all  my  sketches  and  projects  and  to  forswear 
all  future  undertakings.  I  have  tried  to 
sleep  away  my  time  and  pass  two-thirds  of 
the  twenty -four  hours  in  bed.  I  may  speak 
24 


ANIMA  HOMINIS 

of  myself  as  a  dead  man."  I  imagine  Keats 
to  have  been  born  with  that  thirst  for  luxury 
common  to  many  at  the  outsetting  of  the 
Romantic  Movement,  and  not  able,  like 
wealthy  Beckford,  to  slake  it  with  beautiful 
and  strange  objects.  It  drove  him  to  im- 
aginary delights ;  .ignorant,  poor,  and  in  poor 
health,  and  not  perfectly  well-bred,  he  knew 
himself  driven  from  tangible  luxury;  meet- 
ing Shelley,  he  was  resentful  and  suspicious 
because  he,  as  Leigh  Hunt  recalls,  "being 
a  little  too  sensitive  on  the  score  of  his  origin, 
felt  inclined  to  see  in  every  man  of  birth  his 
natural  enemy." 

IV 

Some  thirty  years  ago  I  read  a  prose  alle- 
gory by  Simeon  Solomon,  long  out  of  print 
and  unprocurable,  and  remember  or  seem 
to  remember  a  sentence,  *'a  hollow  image  of 

25 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

fulfilled  desire."  All  happy  art  seems  to  me 
that  hollow  image,  but  when  its  lineaments 
express  also  the  poverty  or  the  exasperation 
that  set  its  maker  to  the  work,  we  call  it 
tragic  art.  Keats  but  gave  us  his  dream  of 
luxury ;  but  while  reading  Dante  we  never 
long  escape  the  conflict,  partly  because  the 
verses  are  at  moments  a  mirror  of  his  history, 
and  yet  more  because  that  history  is  so  clear 
and  simple  that  it  has  the  quality  of  art.  I 
am  no  Dante  scholar,  and  I  but  read  him  in 
Shad  well  or  in  Dante  Rossetti,  but  I  am 
always  persuaded  that  he  celebrated  the 
most  pure  lady  poet  ever  sung  and  the  Divine 
Justice,  not  merely  because  death  took  that 
lady  and  Florence  banished  her  singer,  but 
because  he  had  to  struggle  in  his  own  heart 
with  his  unjust  anger  and  his  lust;  while 
unlike  those  of  the  great  poets,  who  are  at 
peace  with  the  world  and  at  war  with  them- 
26 


ANIMA  HOMINIS 

selves,  he  fought  a  double  war.  "Always," 
says  Boccaccio,  "both  in  youth  and  ma- 
turity he  found  room  among  his  virtues  for 
lechery";  or  as  Matthew  Arnold  preferred 
to  change  the  phrase,  "his  conduct  was  ex- 
ceeding irregular."  Guido  Cavalcanti,  as 
Rossetti  translates  him,  finds  "too  much 
baseness"  in  his  friend  : 

"And  still  thy  speech  of  me,  heartfelt  and 

kind, 
Hath  made  me  treasure  up  thy  poetry ; 
But  now  I  dare  not,  for  thy  abject  life, 
Make  manifest  that  I  approve  thy  rhymes." 

And  when  Dante  meets  Beatrice  in  Eden, 
does  she  not  reproach  him  because,  when 
she  had  taken  her  presence  away,  he  followed 
in  spite  of  warning  dreams,  false  images,  and 
now,  to  save  him  in  his  own  despite,  she  has 
"  visited  .  .  .  the  Portals  of  the  Dead,"  and 
27 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

chosen  Virgil  for  his  courier?  While  Gino 
da  Pistoia  complains  that  in  his  Commedia 
his  *' lovely  heresies  .  .  .  beat  the  right  down 
and  let  the  wrong  go  free" : 

**  Therefore    his    vain    decrees,    wherein    he 

lied. 
Must  be  like  empty  nutshells  flung  aside ; 
Yet   through   the   rash   false   witness   set   to 

grow, 
French  and  Italian  vengeance  on  such  pride 
May  fall  like  Anthony  on  Cicero." 

Dante  himself  sings  to  Giovanni  Guirino 
*'at  the  approach  of  death"  ; 

"The  King,  by  whose  rich  grave  his  servants 

be 
With  plenty  beyond  measure  set  to  dwell. 
Ordains  that  I  my  bitter  wrath  dispel. 
And  lift  mine  eyes  to  the  great  Consistory." 
28 


ANIMA   HOMINIS 

V 

/  We  make  out  of  the  quarrel  with  others, 
rhetoric,  but  of  the  quarrel  with  ourselves, 
poetry.  Unlike  the  rhetoricians,  who  get 
a  confident  voice  from  remembering  the 
crowd  they  have  won  or  may  win,  we  sing 
amid  our  uncertainty;  and,  smitten  even 
in  the  presence  of  the  most  high  beauty  by 
the  knowledge  of  our  solitude,  our  rhythm 
shudders.  I  think,  too,  that  no  fine  poet, 
no  matter  how  disordered  his  life,  has  ever, 
even  in  his  mere  life,  had  pleasure  for  his  end. 
Johnson  and  Dowson,  friends  of  my  youth, 
were  dissipated  men,  the  one  a  drunkard, 
the  other  a  drunkard  and  mad  about  women, 
and  yet  they  had  the  gravity  of  men  who 
had  found  life  out  and  were  awakening  from 
the  dream ;  and  both,  one  in  life  and  art  and 
one  in  art  and  less  in  life,  had  a  continual 
29 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

preoccupation  with  religion.  Nor  has  any 
poet  I  have  read  of  or  heard  of  or  met  with 
been  a  sentimentalist.  The  other  self,  the 
anti-self  or  the  antithetical  self,  as  one  may- 
choose  to  name  it,  comes  but  to  those  who  are 
no  longer  deceived,  whose  passion  is  reality. 
The  sentimentalists  are  practical  men  who 
believe  in  money,  in  position,  in  a  marriage 
bell,  and  whose  understanding  of  happiness 
is  to  be  so  busy  whether  at  work  or  at  play, 
that  all  is  forgotten  but  the  momentary  aim. 
They  find  their  pleasure  in  a  cup  that  is 
filled  from  Lethe's  wharf,  and  for  the  awaken- 
ing, for  the  vision,  for  the  revelation  of  reality, 
tradition  offers  us  a  different  word  —  ecstasy. 
An  old  artist  wrote  to  me  of  his  wanderings 
by  the  quays  of  New  York,  and  how  he  found 
there  a  woman  nursing  a  sick  child,  and 
drew  her  story  from  her.  She  spoke,  too, 
of  other  children  who  had  died :  a  long  tragic 
30 


ANIMA  HOMINIS 

story.  "I  wanted  to  paint  her,"  he  wrote, 
"if  I  denied  myself  any  of  the  pain  I  could 
not  believe  in  my  own  ecstasy."  We  must 
not  make  a  false  faith  by  hiding  from  our 
thoughts  the  causes  of  doubt,  for  faith  is  the 
highest  achievement  of  the  human  intellect, 
the  only  gift  man  can  make  to  God,  and 
therefore  it  must  be  offered  in  sincerity. 
Neither  must  we  create,  by  hiding  ugliness, 
a  false  beauty  as  our  offering  to  the  world. 
^  He  only  can  create  the  greatest  imaginable 
beauty  who  has  endured  all  imaginable  pangs, 
for  only  when  we  have  seen  and  foreseen 
what  we  dread  shall  we  be  rewarded  by  that 
dazzling  unforeseen  wing-footed  wanderer.  / 
We  could  not  find  him  if  he  were  not  in  some 
sense  of  our  being  and  yet  of  our  being  but 
as  water  with  fire,  a  noise  with  silence.  He 
is  of  all  things  not  impossible  the  most  dif- 
ficult, for  that  only  which  comes  easily  can 
31 


PER  AMIGA   SILENTIA  LUNAE 

never  be  a  portion  of  our  being,  "Soon  got, 
soon  gone,"  as  the  proverb  says.  I  shall 
find  the  dark  grow  luminous,  the  void  fruit- 
ful when  I  understand  I  have  nothing,  that 
the  ringers  in  the  tower  have  appointed  for 
the  hymen  of  the  soul  a  passing  bell. 

The  last  knowledge  has  often  come  most 
quickly  to  turbulent  men,  and  for  a  season 
brought  new  turbulence.  When  life  puts 
away  her  conjuring  tricks  one  by  one,  those 
that  deceive  us  longest  may  well  be  the  wine- 
cup  and  the  sensual  kiss,  for  our  Chambers 
of  Commerce  and  of  Commons  have  not  the 
divine  architecture  of  the  body,  nor  has  their 
frenzy  been  ripened  by  the  sun.  The  poet, 
because  he  may  not  stand  within  the  sacred 
house  but  lives  amid  the  whirlwinds  that 
beset  its  threshold,  may  find  his  pardon. 


ANIMA  HOMINIS 

VI 

I  think  the  Christian  saint  and  hero,  in- 
stead of  being  merely  dissatisfied,  make  de- 
liberate sacrifice.  I  remember  reading  once 
an  autobiography  of  a  man  who  had  made  a 
daring  journey  in  disguise  to  Russian  exiles 
in  Siberia,  and  his  telling  how,  very  timid 
as  a  child,  he  schooled  himself  by  wander- 
ing at  night  through  dangerous  streets. 
Saint  and  hero  cannot  be  content  to  pass 
at  moments  to  that  hollow  image  and  after 
become  their  heterogeneous  selves,  but  would 
always,  if  they  could,  resemble  the  anti- 
thetical self.  There  is  a  shadow  of  type  on 
type,  for  in  all  great  poetical  styles  there  is 
saint  or  hero,  but  when  it  is  all  over  Dante 
can  return  to  his  chambering  and  Shake- 
speare to  his  "pottle  pot."  They  sought 
no  impossible  perfection  but  when  they 
D  33 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

jhandled   paper   or  parchment.     So   too   will 
saint  or  hero,  because  he  works  in  his  own 

I  flesh  and  blood  and  not  in  paper  or  parch- 
ment,    have    more    deliberate    understanding 

_fif  that  other  flesh  and  blood. 

Some  years  ago  I  began  to  believe  that 
our  culture,  with  its  doctrine  of  sincerity 
and  self-realisation,  made  us  gentle  and 
passive,  and  that  the  Middle  Ages  and  the 
Renaissance  were  right  to  found  theirs  upon 
the  imitation  of  Christ  or  of  some  classic 
hero.  St.  Francis  and  Caesar  Borgia  made 
themselves  over-mastering,  creative  persons 
by  turning  from  the  mirror  to  meditation 
upon  a  mask.  When  I  had  this  thought  I 
could  see  nothing  else  in  life.  I  could  not 
write  the  play  I  had  planned,  for  all  became 
allegorical,  and  though  I  tore  up  hundreds 
of  pages  in  my  endeavour  to  escape  from 
allegory,  my  imagination  became  sterile  for 


ANIMA   HOMINIS 

nearly  five  years  and  I  only  escaped  at  last 
when  I  had  mocked  in  a  comedy  my  own 
thought.  I  was  always  thinking  of  the  ele- 
ment of  imitation  in  style  and  in  life,  and  of 
the  life  beyond  heroic  imitation.  I  find  in 
an  old  diary:  "I  think  all  happiness  depends 
on  the  energy  to  assume  the  mask  of  some 
other  life,  on  a  re-birth  as  something  not  one's 
self,  something  created  in  a  moment  and 
perpetually  renewed ;  in  playing  a  game  like 
that  of  a  child  where  one  loses  the  infinite 
pain  of  self-realisation,  in  a  grotesque  or 
solemn  painted  face  put  on  that  one  may 
hide  from  the  terror  of  judgment.  .  .  . 
Perhaps  all  the  sins  and  energies  of  the  world 
are  but  the  world's  flight  from  an  infinite 
blinding  beam";  and  again  at  an  earlier 
date:  "If  we  cannot  imagine  ourselves  as 
different  from  what  we  are,  and  try  to  as- 
sume that  second  self,  we  cannot  impose  a 
35 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

discipline  upon  ourselves  though  we  may 
accept  one  from  others.  Active  virtue,  as 
distinguished  from  the  passive  acceptance 
of  a  code,  is  therefore  theatrical,  consciously 
dramatic,  the  wearing  of  a  mask.  ,  .  . 
Wordsworth,  great  poet  though  he  be,  is 
so  often  flat  and  heavy  partly  because  his 
moral  sense,  being  a  discipline  he  had  not 
created,  a  mere  obedience,  has  no  theatrical 
element.  This  increases  his  popularity  with 
the  better  kind  of  journalists  and  politicians 
who  have  written  books." 

VII 

I  thought  the  hero  found  hanging  upon 
some  oak  of  Dodona  an  ancient  mask,  where 
perhaps  there  lingered  something  of  Egypt, 
and  that  he  changed  it  to  his  fancy,  touching 
it  a  little  here  and  there,  gilding  the  eye- 
brows or  putting  a  gilt  line  where  the  cheek- 


ANIMA  HOMINIS 

bone  comes ;  that  when  at  last  he  looked  out 
of  its  eyes  he  knew  another's  breath  came 
and  went  within  his  breath  upon  the  carven 
lips,  and  that  his  eyes  were  upon  the  instant 
fixed  upon  a  visionary  world :  how  else  could 
the  god  have  come  to  us  in  the  forest?  The 
good,  unlearned  books  say  that  He  who  keeps 
the  distant  stars  within  His  fold  comes  with- 
out intermediary,  but  Plutarch's  precepts 
and  the  experience  of  old  women  in  Soho, 
ministering  their  witchcraft  to  servant  girls 
at  a  shilling  apiece,  will  have  it  that  a  strange 
living  man  may  win  for  Daemon  an  illus- 
trious dead  man ;  but  now  I  add  another 
thought :  the  Daemon  comes  not  as  like  to 
like  but  seeking  its  own  opposite,  for  man 
and  Daemon  feed  the  hunger  in  one  another's 
hearts.  Because  the  ghost  is  simple,  the 
man  heterogeneous  and  confused,  they  are 
but  knit  together  when  the  man  has  found  a 
37 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

mask  whose  lineaments  permit  the  expres- 
sion of  all  the  man  most  lacks,  and  it  may 
be  dreads,  and  of  that  only. 

The  more  insatiable  in  all  desire,  the  more 
resolute  to  refuse  deception  or  an  easy  vic- 
tory, the  more  close  will  be  the  bond,  the 
more  violent  and  definite  the  antipathy. 

VIII 

I  think  that  all  religious  men  have  be- 
lieved that  there  is  a  hand  not  ours  in  the 
events  of  life,  and  that,  as  somebody  says 
in  Wilhelm  Meister,  accident  is  destiny;  and 
I  think  it  was  Heraclitus  who  said :  the 
Daemon  is  our  destiny.  When  I  think  of 
life  as  a  struggle  with  the  Daemon  who  would 
ever  set  us  to  the  hardest  work  among  those 
not  impossible,  I  understand  why  there  is  a 
deep  enmity  between  a  man  and  his  destiny, 
and  why  a  man  loves  nothing  but  his  destiny. 
38 


ANIMA  HOMINIS 

In  an  Anglo-Saxon  poem  a  certain  man  is 
called,  as  though  to  call  him  something  that 
summed  up  all  heroism,  "Doom  eager." 
I  am  persuaded  that  the  Daemon  delivers 
and  deceives  us,  and  that  he  wove  that  netting 
from  the  stars  and  threw  the  net  from  his 
shoulder.  Then  my  imagination  runs  from 
Daemon  to  sweetheart,  and  I  divine  an 
analogy  that  evades  the  intellect.  I  re- 
member that  Greek  antiquity  has  bid  us 
look  for  the  principal  stars,  that  govern 
enemy  and  sweetheart  alike,  among  those 
that  are  about  to  set,  in  the  Seventh  House 
as  the  astrologers  say;  and  that  it  may  be 
"sexual  love,"  which  is  "founded  upon 
spiritual  hate,"  is  an  image  of  the  warfare 
of  man  and  Daemon ;  and  I  even  wonder 
if  there  may  not  be  some  secret  communion, 
some  whispering  in  the  dark  between  Daemon 
and  sweetheart.  I  remember  how  often 
39 


PER  AMIGA   SILENTIA  LUNAE 

women,  when  in  love,  grow  superstitious, 
and  believe  that  they  can  bring  their  lovers 
good  luck;  and  I  remember  an  old  Irish 
story  of  three  young  men  who  went  seeking 
for  help  in  battle  into  the  house  of  the  gods  at 
Slieve-na-mon.  *' You  must  first  be  married," 
some  god  told  them,  "because  a  man's  good 
or  evil  luck  comes  to  him  through  a  woman." 
I  sometimes  fence  for  half-an-hour  at  the 
day's  end,  and  when  I  close  my  eyes  upon 
the  pillow  I  see  a  foil  playing  before  me,  the 
button  to  my  face.  We  meet  always  in  the 
deep  of  the  mind,  whatever  our  work,  wher- 
ever our  reverie  carries  us,  that  other  Will. 

IX 

The  poet  finds  and  makes  his  mask  in  dis- 
appointment,  the  hero  in  defeat.     The  de- 
sire that  is  satisfied  is  not  a  great  desire,  nor 
has  the  shoulder  used  all  its  might  that  an 
40 


ANIMA  HOMINIS 

unbreakable  gate  has  never  strained.  The 
saint  alone  is  not  deceived,  neither  thrust- 
ing with  his  shoulder  nor  holding  out  un- 
satisfied hands.  He  would  climb  without 
wandering  to  the  antithetical  self  of  the 
world,  the  Indian  narrowing  his  thought  in 
meditation  or  driving  it  away  in  contem- 
plation, the  Christian  copying  Christ,  the 
antithetical  self  of  the  classic  world.  For 
a  hero  loves  the  world  till  it  breaks  him,  and 
the  poet  till  it  has  broken  faith ;  but  while 
the  world  was  yet  debonair,  the  saint  has 
turned  away,  and  because  he  renounced  Ex- 
perience itself,  he  will  wear  his  mask  as  he 
finds  it.  The  poet  or  the  hero,  no  matter 
upon  what  bark  they  found  their  mask,  so 
teeming  their  fancy,  somewhat  change  its 
lineaments,  but  the  saint,  whose  life  is  but  a 
round  of  customary  duty,  needs  nothing  the 
whole  world  does  not  need,  and  day  by  day 
41 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

he  scourges  in  his  body  the  Roman  and 
Christian  conquerors :  Alexander  and  Caesar 
are  famished  in  his  cell.  His  nativity  is 
neither  in  disappointment  nor  in  defeat, 
but  in  a  temptation  like  that  of  Christ  in 
the  Wilderness,  a  contemplation  in  a  single 
instant  perpetually  renewed  of  the  Kingdom 
of  the  World;  all,  because  all  renounced, 
continually  present  showing  their  empty 
thrones.  Edwin  Ellis,  remembering  that 
Christ  also  measured  the  sacrifice,  imagined 
himself  in  a  fine  poem  as  meeting  at  Gol- 
gotha the  phantom  of  "Christ  the  Less," 
the  Christ  who  might  have  lived  a  pros- 
perous life  without  the  knowledge  of  sin,  and 
who  now  wanders  "  companionless  a  weary 
spectre  day  and  night." 

"I  saw  him  go  and  cried  to  him 
'Eli,  thou  hast  forsaken  me.' 

42 


ANIMA   HOMINIS 

The  nails  were  burning  through  each  Hmb, 
He  fled  to  find  fehcity." 

And  yet  is  the  saint  spared,  despite  his 
martyr's  crown  and  his  vigil  of  desire,  defeat, 
disappointed  love,  and  the  sorrow  of  parting. 

"O  Night,  that  did'st  lead  thus, 
O  Night,   more  lovely   than   the  dawn   of 

light, 
O  Night,  that  broughtest  us 
Lover  to  lover's  sight. 
Lover  with  loved  in  marriage  of  delight ! 

Upon  my  flowery  breast, 
Wholly  for  him,  and  save  himself  for  none, 
There  did  I  give  sweet  rest 
To  my  beloved  one ; 

The  fanning  of  the  cedars  breathed  thereon. 
When  the  first  morning  air 
Blew  from  the  tower,  and  waved  his  locks 
aside, 

43 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

His  hand,  with  gentle  care. 
Did  wound  me  in  the  side, 
And  in  my  body  all  my  senses  died. 

All  things  I  then  forgot. 

My   cheek   on    him    who    for    my   coming 

came; 
All  ceased  and  I  was  not. 
Leaving  my  cares  and  shame 
Among  the  lilies,  and  forgetting  them."  ^ 

X 

It  is  not  permitted  to  a  man,  who  takes 
up  pen  or  chisel,  to  seek  originality,  for 
passion  is  his  only  business,  and  he  cannot 
but  mould  or  sing  after  a  new  fashion  be- 
cause no  disaster  is  like  another.  He  is  like 
those  phantom  lovers  in  the  Japanese  play 
who,  compelled  to  wander  side  by  side  and 

1  Translated  by  Arthur  Symons  from  Son  Juan  de  la  Cruz. 

44 


ANIMA  HOMINIS 

never  mingle,  cry:  "We  neither  wake  nor 
sleep  and  passing  our  nights  in  a  sorrow  which 
is  in  the  end  a  vision,  what  are  these  scenes 
of  spring  to  us?"  If  when  we  have  found 
a  mask  we  fancy  that  it  will  not  match  our 
mood  till  we  have  touched  with  gold  the 
cheek,  we  do  it  furtively,  and  only  where  the 
oaks  of  Dodona  cast  their  deepest  shadow, 
for  could  he  see  our  handiwork  the  Daemon 
would  fling  himself  out,   being  our  enemy. 

XI 

Many  years  ago  I  saw,  between  sleeping 
and  waking,  a  woman  of  incredible  beauty 
shooting  an  arrow  into  the  sky,  and  from  the 
moment  when  I  made  my  first  guess  at  her 
meaning  I  have  thought  much  of  the  differ- 
ence between  the  winding  movement  of 
nature  and  the  straight  line,  which  is  called 
in  Balzac's  Seraphita  the  "Mark  of  Man,"  <j^ 

45 


PER  AMIGA   SILENTIA  LUNAE 

but  comes  closer  to  my  m^eaning  as  the  mark 
of  saint  or  sage.  I  think  that  we  who  are 
poets  and  artists,  not  being  permitted  to 
shoot  beyond  the  tangible,  must  go  from 
desire  to  weariness  and  so  to  desire  again,  and 
live  but  for  the  moment  when  vision  comes 
to  our  weariness  like  terrible  lightning,  in 
the  humility  of  the  brutes.  I  do  not  doubt 
those  heaving  circles,  those  winding  arcs, 
whether  in  one  man's  life  or  in  that  of  an 
age,  are  mathematical,  and  that  some  in  the 
world,  or  beyond  the  world,  have  foreknown 
the  event  and  pricked  upon  the  calendar 
the  life-span  of  a  Christ,  a  Buddha,  a  Na- 
poleon :  that  every  movement,  in  feeling  or 
in  thought,  prepares  in  the  dark  by  its  own 
increasing  clarity  and  confidence  its  own 
executioner.  We  seek  reality  with  the  slow 
toil  of  our  weakness  and  are  smitten  from  the 
boundless  and  the  unforeseen.  Only  when 
46 


ANIMA   HOMINIS 

we  are  saint  or  sage,  and  renounce  Experi- 
ence itself,  can  we,  in  the  language  of  the 
Christian  Caballa,  leave  the  sudden  lightning 
and  the  path  of  the  serpent  and  become  the 
bowman  who  aims  his  arrow  at  the  centre  of 
the  sun. 

XII 

The  doctors  of  medicine  have  discovered 
that  certain  dreams  of  the  night,  for  I  do  not 
grant  them  all,  are  the  day's  unfulfilled  de- 
sire, and  that  our  terror  of  desires  condemned 
by  the  conscience  has  distorted  and  dis- 
turbed our  dreams.  They  have  only  studied 
the  breaking  into  dream  of  elements  that 
have  remained  unsatisfied  without  purify- 
ing discouragement.  We  can  satisfy  in  life 
a  few  of  our  passions  and  each  passion  but 
a  little,  and  our  characters  indeed  but  difiFer 
because  no  two  men  bargain  alike.  The 
bargain,  the  compromise,  is  always  threat- 
47 


PER  AMIGA   SILENTIA  LUNAE 

ened,  and  when  it  is  broken  we  become  mad 
or  hysterical  or  are  in  some  way  deluded; 
and  so  when  a  starved  or  banished  passion 
shows  in  a  dream  we,  before  awaking,  break 
the  logic  that  had  given  it  the  capacity  of 
action  and  throw  it  into  chaos  again.  But 
the  passions,  when  we  know  that  they  can- 
|not  find  fulfilment,  become  vision;  and  a 
,'  vision,  whether  we  wake  or  sleep,  prolongs 
/  its  power  by  rhythm  and  pattern,  the  wheel 
where  the  world  is  butterfly.  We  need  no 
protection,  but  it  does,  for  if  we  become  in- 
terested in  ourselves,  in  our  own  lives,  we 
pass  out  of  the  vision.  Whether  it  is  we 
or  the  vision  that  create  the  pattern,  who 
set  the  wheel  turning,  it  is  hard  to  say,  but 
certainly  we  have  a  hundred  ways  of  keep- 
ing it  near  us :  we  select  our  images  from 
past  times,  we  turn  from  our  own  age  and 
try  to  feel  Chaucer  nearer  than  the  daily 
48 


ANIMA  HOMINIS 

paper.  It  compels  us  to  cover  all  it  cannot 
incorporate,  and  would  carry  us  when  it 
comes  in  sleep  to  that  moment  when  even 
sleep  closes  her  eyes  and  dreams  begin  to 
dream;  and  we  are  taken  up  into  a  clear 
light  and  are  forgetful  even  of  our  own  names 
and  actions  and  yet  in  perfect  possession  of 
ourselves  murmur  like  Faust,  *'Stay,  mo- 
ment," and  murmur  in  vain. 

XIII 

A  poet,  when  he  is  growing  old,  will  ask 
himself  if  he  cannot  keep  his  mask  and 
his  _jdsion  without  new  bitterness,  new 
disappointment.  Could  he  if  he  would, 
knowing  how  frail  his  vigour  from  youth 
up,  copy  Landor  who  lived  loving  and  hat- 
ing, ridiculous  and  unconquered,  into  ex- 
treme old  age,  all  lost  but  the  favour  of  his 
muses. 

E  49 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE' 

The  mother  of  the  muses  we  are  taught 
Is  memory ;  she  has  left  me ;  they  remain 
And  shake  my  shoulder  urging  me  to  sing. 

Surely,  he  may  think,  now  that  I  have 
found  vision  and  mask  I  need  not  suffer  any 
longer.  He  will  buy  perhaps  some  small  old 
house  where  like  Ariosto  he  can  dig  his 
garden,  and  think  that  in  the  return  of  birds 
and  leaves,  or  moon  and  sun,  and  in  the  even- 
ing flight  of  the  rooks  he  may  discover 
rhythm  and  pattern  like  those  in  sleep  and 
so  never  awake  out  of  vision.  Then  he  will 
remember  Wordsworth  withering  into  eighty 
years,  honoured  and  empty-witted,  and  climb 
to  some  waste  room  and  find,  forgotten  there 
by  youth,  some  bitter  crust. 

February  25,  1917. 


50 


ANIMA  MUNDI 
I 

I  HAVE  always  sought  to  bring  my  mind  close 
to  the  mind  of  Indian  and  Japanese  poets, 
old  women  in  Connaught,  mediums  in  Soho, 
lay  brothers  whom  I  imagine  dreaming  in 
some  mediaeval  monastery  the  dreams  of 
their  village,  learned  authors  who  refer  all 
to  antiquity;  to  immerse  it  in  the  general 
mind  where  that  mind  is  scarce  separable 
from  what  we  have  begun  to  call  "the  sub- 
conscious" ;  to  liberate  it  from  all  that  comes 
of  councils  and  committees,  from  the  world 
as  it  is  seen  from  universities  or  from  popu- 
lous towns;  and  that  I  might  so  believe  I 
have  murmured  evocations  and  frequented 
mediums,  delighted  in  all  that  displayed 
51 


PER  AMIGA   SILENTIA  LUNAE 

great  problems  through  sensuous  images,  or 
exciting  phrases,  accepting  from  abstract 
schools  but  a  few  technical  words  that  are 
so  old  they  seem  but  broken  architraves 
fallen  amid  bramble  and  grass,  and  have  put 
myself  to  school  where  all  things  are  seen : 
A  Tenedo  Tacitae  per  Arnica  Silentia  Lunae. 
At  one  time  I  thought  to  prove  my  conclu- 
sions by  quoting  from  diaries  where  I  have 
recorded  certain  strange  events  the  moment 
they  happened,  but  now  I  have  changed  my 
mind  —  I  will  but  say  like  the  Arab  boy  that 
became  Vizier:  "O  brother,  I  have  taken 
stock  in  the  desert  sand  and  of  the  sayings  of 
antiquity." 

II 

There  is  a  letter  of  Goethe's,  though  I 
cannot  remember  where,  that  explains  evo- 
cation, though  he  was  but  thinking  of  litera- 
ture.    He   described   some   friend    who   had 

52 


ANIMA  MUNDI 

complained  of  literary  sterility  as  too  intelli- 
gent. One  must  allow  the  images  to  form 
with  all  their  associations  before  one  criticises. 
*'If  one  is  critical  too  soon,"  he  wrote,  "they 
will  not  form  at  all."  If  you  suspend  the 
critical  faculty,  I  have  discovered,  either  as 
the  result  of  training,  or,  if  you  have  the 
gift,  by  passing  into  a  slight  trance,  images 
pass  rapidly  before  you.  If  you  can  suspend 
also  desire,  and  let  them  form  at  their  own 
will,  your  absorption  becomes  more  complete 
and  they  are  more  clear  in  colour,  more  pre- 
cise in  articulation,  and  you  and  they  begin 
to  move  in  the  midst  of  what  seems  a  power- 
ful light.  But  the  images  pass  before  you 
linked  by  certain  associations,  and  indeed 
in  the  first  instance  you  have  called  them  up 
by  their  association  with  traditional  forms 
and  sounds.  You  have  discovered  how,  if 
you  can  but  suspend  will  and  intellect,  to 
53 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

bring  up  from  the  "subconscious"  anything 
you  already  possess  a  fragment  of.  Those 
who  follow  the  old  rule  keep  their  bodies  still 
and  their  minds  awake  and  clear,  dreading 
especially  any  confusion  between  the  images 
of  the  mind  and  the  objects  of  sense ;  they 
seek  to  become,  as  it  were,  polished  mirrors. 

I  had  no  natural  gift  for  this  clear  quiet, 
as  I  soon  discovered,  for  my  mind  is  ab- 
normally restless;  and  I  was  seldom  de- 
lighted by  that  sudden  luminous  definition 
of  form  which  makes  one  understand  almost 
in  spite  of  oneself  that  one  is  not  merely 
imagining.  I  therefore  invented  a  new  pro- 
cess. I  had  found  that  after  evocation  my 
sleep  became  at  moments  full  of  light  and 
form,  all  that  I  had  failed  to  find  while  awake ; 
and  I  elaborated  a  symbolism  of  natural  ob- 
jects that  I  might  give  myself  dreams  during 
sleep,  or  rather  visions,  for  they  had  none  of 
54 


ANIMA   MUNDI 

the  confusion  of  dreams,  by  laying  upon  my 
pillow  or  beside  my  bed  certain  flowers  or 
leaves.  Even  to-day,  after  twenty  years, 
the  exaltations  and  the  messages  that  came 
to  me  from  bits  of  hawthorn  or  some  other 
plant  seem  of  all  moments  of  my  life  the 
happiest  and  the  wisest.  After  a  time,  per- 
haps because  the  novelty  wearing  off  the 
symbol  lost  its  power,  or  because  my  work  at 
the  Irish  Theatre  became  too  exciting,  my 
sleep  lost  its  responsiveness.  I  had  fellow- 
scholars,  and  now  it  was  I  and  now  they  who 
made  some  discovery.  Before  the  mind's 
eye,  whether  in  sleep  or  waking,  came  images 
that  one  was  to  discover  presently  in  some 
book  one  had  never  read,  and  after  looking 
in  vain  for  explanation  to  the  current  theory 
of  forgotten  personal  memory;*  I  came  to  be- 
lieve in  a  great  memory  passing  on  from 
generation  to  generation.  But  that  was  not 
55 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

enough,  for  these  images  showed  intention 
and  choice.  They  had  a  relation  to  what 
one  knew  and  yet  were  an  extension  of  one's 
knowledge.  If  no  mind  was  there,  why 
should  I  suddenly  come  upon  salt  and  anti- 
mony, upon  the  liquefaction  of  the  gold,  as 
they  were  understood  by  the  alchemists,  or 
upon  some  detail  of  cabalistic  symbolism 
verified  at  last  by  a  learned  scholar  from  his 
never-published  manuscripts,  and  who  can 
have  put  together  so  ingeniously,  working  by 
some  law  of  association  and  yet  with  clear 
intention  and  personal  application,  certain 
mythological  images.  They  had  shown  them- 
selves to  several  minds,  a  fragment  at  a  time, 
and  had  only  shown  their  meaning  when  the 
puzzle  picture  had  been  put  together.  The 
thought  was  again  and  again  before  me  that 
this  study  had  created  a  contact  or  mingling 
with  minds  who  had  followed  a  like  study  in 
56 


ANIMA  MUNDI 

some  other  age,  and  that  these  minds  still 
saw  and  thought  and  chose.  Our  daily 
thought  was  certainly  but  the  line  of  foam 
at  the  shallow  edge  of  a  vast  luminous  sea: 
Henry  More's  Anima  Mundi,  Wordsworth's 
"immortal  sea  which  brought  us  hither  .  .  . 
and  near  whose  edge  the  children  sport," 
and  in  that  sea  there  were  some  who  swam 
or  sailed,  explorers  who  perhaps  knew  all  its 
shores. 

Ill 
I  had  always  to  compel  myself  to  fix  the 
imagination  upon  the  minds  behind  the  per- 
sonifications, and  yet  the  personifications 
were  themselves  living  and  vivid.  The 
minds  that  swayed  these  seemingly  fluid 
images  had  doubtless  form,  and  those  images 
themselves  seemed,  as  it  were,  mirrored  in  a 
living  substance  whose  form  is  but  change 
of  form.  From  tradition  and  perception, 
57 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

one  thought  of  one's  own  Ufe  as  symboHsed 
by  earth,  the  place  of  heterogeneous  things, 
the  images  as  mirrored  in  water  and  the 
images  themselves  one  could  divine  but  as 
air;  and  beyond  it  all  there  was,  I  felt  con- 
fident, certain  aims  and  governing  loves, 
the  fire  that  makes  all  simple.  Yet  the 
images  themselves  were  fourfold,  and  one 
judged  their  meaning  in  part  from  the  pre- 
dominance of  one  out  of  the  four  elements, 
or  that  of  the  fifth  element,  the  veil  hiding 
another  four,  a  bird  born  out  of  the  fire. 

IV 

I  longed  to  know  something  even  if  it  were 
but  the  family  and  Christian  names  of  those 
minds  that  I  could  divine,  and  that  yet  re- 
mained always  as  it  seemed  impersonal.  The 
sense  of  contact  came  perhaps  but  two  or 
three  times  with  clearness  and  certainty,  but 
58 


ANIMA   MUNDI 

it  left  among  all  to  whom  it  came  some  trace, 
a  sudden  silence,  as  it  were,  in  the  midst  of 
thought  or  perhaps  at  moments  of  crisis  a 
faint  voice.  Were  our  masters  right  when 
they  declared  so  solidly  that  we  should  be 
content  to  know  these  presences  that  seemed 
friendly  and  near  but  as  "the  phantom"  in 
Coleridge's  poem,  and  to  think  of  them  per- 
haps, as  having,  as  St.  Thomas  says,  entered 
upon  the  eternal  possession  of  themselves  in 
one  single  moment  ? 

*'A11  look  and  likeness  caught  from  earth. 
All  accident  of  kin  and  birth. 
Had  passed  away.     There  was  no  trace 
Of  ought  on  that  illumined  face. 
Upraised  beneath  the  rifted  stone. 
But  of  one  spirit  all  her  own ; 
She,  she  herself  and  only  she. 
Shone  through  her  body  visibly." 
59 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 


One  night  I  heard  a  voice  that  said: 
"The  love  of  God  for  every  human  soul  is 
infinite,  for  every  human  soul  is  unique ;  no 
other  can  satisfy  the  same  need  in  God.'* 
Our  masters  had  not  denied  that  personality 
outlives  the  body  or  even  that  its  rougher 
shape  may  cling  to  us  a  while  after  death,  but 
only  that  we  should  seek  it  in  those  who  are 
dead.  Yet  when  I  went  among  the  country 
people,  I  found  that  they  sought  and  found 
the  old  fragilities,  infirmities,  physiognomies 
that  living  stirred  affection.  The  Spiddal 
knowledgeable  man,  who  had  his  knowledge 
from  his  sister's  ghost,  noticed  every  hal- 
lowe'en,  when  he  met  her  at  the  end  of  the 
garden,  that  her  hair  was  greyer.  Had  she 
perhaps  to  exhaust  her  allotted  years  in  the 
neighbourhood  of  her  home,  having  died  be- 
60 


ANIMA  MUNDI 

fore  her  time  ?  Because  no  authority  seemed 
greater  than  that  of  this  knowledge  running 
backward  to  the  beginning  of  the  world,  I 
began  that  study  of  spiritism  so  despised  by 
Stanislas  de  Gaeta,  the  one  eloquent  learned 
scholar  who  has  written  of  magic  in  our 
generation. 

VI 

I  know  much  that  I  could  never  have 
known  had  I  not  learnt  to  consider  in  the 
after  life  what,  there  as  here,  is  rough  and 
disjointed ;  nor  have  I  found  that  the  mediums 
in  Connaught  and  Soho  have  anything  I  can- 
not find  some  light  on  in  Henry  More,  who 
was  called  during  his  life  the  holiest  man  now 
walking  upon  the  earth. 

All  souls  have  a  vehicle  or  body,  and  when 

one  has  said  that,  with  More  and  the  Pla- 

tonists  one  has  escaped  from   the   abstract 

schools  who  seek  always  the  power  of  some 

61 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

church  or  institution,  and  found  oneself  with 
great  poetry,  and  superstition  which  is  but 
popular  poetry,  in  a  pleasant  dangerous 
world.  Beauty  is  indeed  but  bodily  life  in 
some  ideal  condition.  The  vehicle  of  the 
human  soul  is  what  used  to  be  called  the 
animal  spirits,  and  Henry  More  quotes  from 
Hippocrates  this  sentence:  *'The  mind  of 
man  is  .  .  .  not  nourished  from  meats  and 
drinks  from  the  belly,  but  by  a  clear  lumi- 
nous substance  that  redounds  by  separation 
from  the  blood."  These  animal  spirits  fill 
up  all  parts  of  the  body  and  make  up  the  body 
of  air,  as  certain  writers  of  the  seventeenth 
century  have  called  it.  The  soul  has  a  plastic 
power,  and  can  after  death,  or  during  life. 
should  the  vehicle  leave  the  body  for  a  while, 
mould  it  to  any  shape  it  will  by  an  act  of 
imagination,  though  the  more  unlike  to  the 
habitual  that  shape  is,  the  greater  the  effort. 
62 


ANIMA  MUNDI 

To  living  and  dead  alike,  the  purity  and 
abundance  of  the  animal  spirits  are  a  chief 
power.  The  soul  can  mould  from  these  an 
apparition  clothed  as  if  in  life,  and  make  it 
visible  by  showing  it  to  our  mind's  eye,  or  by 
building  into  its  substance  certain  particles 
drawn  from  the  body  of  a  medium  till  it  is  as 
visible  and  tangible  as  any  other  object.  To 
help  that  building  the  ancients  offered  fragrant 
gum,  the  odour  of  flowers,  and  it  may  be  pieces 
of  virgin  wax.  The  half  materialised  vehicle 
slowly  exudes  from  the  skin  in  dull  luminous 
drops  or  condenses  from  a  luminous  cloud, 
the  light  fading  as  weight  and  density  in- 
crease. The  witch,  going  beyond  the  medium, 
offered  to  the  slowly  animating  phantom 
certain  drops  of  her  blood.  The  vehicle  once 
separate  from  the  living  man  or  woman  may 
be  moulded  by  the  souls  of  others  as  readily 
as  by  its  own  soul,  and  even  it  seems  by  the 
63 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

souls  of  the  living.  It  becomes  a  part  for 
a  while  of  that  stream  of  images  which  I  have 
compared  to  reflections  upon  water.  But 
how  does  it  follow  that  souls  who  never  have 
handled  the  modelling  tool  or  the  brush, 
make  perfect  images  .f*  Those  materialisa- 
tions who  imprint  their  powerful  faces  upon 
paraffin  wax,  leave  there  sculpture  that  would 
have  taken  a  good  artist,  making  and  imagin- 
ing, many  hours.  How  did  it  follow  that 
an  ignorant  woman  could,  as  Henry  More 
believed,  project  her  vehicle  in  so  good  a 
likeness  of  a  hare,  that  horse  and  hound 
and  huntsman  followed  with  the  bugle  blow- 
ing? Is  not  the  problem  the  same  as  of 
[those  finely  articulated  scenes  and  patterns 
that  come  out  of  the  dark,  seemingly  com- 
pleted in  the  winking  of  an  eye,  as  we  are 
lying  half  asleep,  and  of  all  those  elaborate 
images  that  drift  in  moments  of  inspiration 
64 


ANIMA   MUNDI 

or  evocation  before  the  mind's  eye?  Our 
animal  spirits  or  vehicles  are  but  as  it  were 
a  condensation  of  the  vehicle  of  Anima 
Mundi,  and  give  substance  to  its  images  in 
the  faint  materialisation  of  our  common 
thought,  or  more  grossly  when  a  ghost  is  our 
visitor.  It  should  be  no  great  feat,  once 
those  images  have  dipped  into  our  vehicle, 
to  take  their  portraits  in  the  photographic 
camera.  Henry  M©re  will  have  it  that  a 
hen  scared  by  a  hawk  when  the  cock  is  tread- 
ing, hatches  out  a  hawkheaded  chicken  (I 
am  no  stickler  for  the  fact),  because  before 
the  soul  of  the  unborn  bird  could  give  the 
shape  "the  deeply  impassioned  fancy  of  the 
mother"  called  from  the  general  cistern  of 
form  a  competing  image.  "The  soul  of  the 
world,"  he  runs  on,  "interposes  and  insinu- 
ates into  all  generations  of  things  while  the 
matter  is  fluid  and  yielding,  which  would 
F  65 


PER  AMIGA   SILENTIA  LUNAE 

induce  a  man  to  believe  that  she  may  not 
stand  idle  in  the  transformation  of  the  vehicle 
of  the  daemons,  but  assist  the  fancies  and  de- 
sires, and  so  help  to  clothe  them  and  to  utter 
them  according  to  their  own  pleasures;  or 
it  may  be  sometimes  against  their  wills  as 
the  unwieldiness  of  the  mother's  fancy  forces 
upon  her  a  monstrous  birth."  Though  images 
appear  to  flow  and  drift,  it  may  be  that  we 
but  change  in  our  relation  to  them,  now  los- 
ing, now  finding  with  the  shifting  of  our 
minds;  and  certainly  Henry  More  speaks 
by  the  book,  claiming  that  those  images  may 
be  hard  to  the  right  touch  as  "pillars  of 
crystal"  and  as  solidly  coloured  as  our  own 
to  the  right  eyes.  Shelley,  a  good  Platonist, 
seems  in  his  earliest  work  to  set  this  general 
soul  in  the  place  of  God,  an  opinion,  one  may 
find  from  More's  friend  Gudworth  now  af- 
firmed, now  combated,  by  classic  authority; 
66 


ANIMA  MUNDI 

but  More  would  steady  us  with  a  definition. 
The  general  soul  as  apart  from  its  vehicle  is 
*'a  substance  incorporeal  but  without  sense 
and  animadversion  pervading  the  whole 
matter  of  the  universe  and  exercising  a  plas- 
tic power  therein,  according  to  the  sundry 
predispositions  and  occasions,  in  the  parts 
it  works  upon,  raising  such  phenomena  in  the 
world,  by  directing  the  parts  of  the  matter 
and  their  motion  as  cannot  be  resolved  into 
mere  mechanical  powers."  I  must  assume 
that  "sense  and  animadversion,"  perception 
and  direction,  are  always  faculties  of  in- 
dividual soul,  and  that,  as  Blake  said,  "God 
only  acts  or  is  in  existing  beings  or  men." 

VII 

The  old  theological  conception  of  the  in- 
dividual soul  as  bodiless  or  abstract  led  to 
what  Henry  More  calls   "contradictory  de- 
67 


PER  AMIGA   SILENTIA  LUNAE 

bate"  as  to  how  many  angels  "could  dance 
booted  and  spurred  upon  the  point  of  a 
needle,"  and  made  it  possible  for  rationalist 
physiology  to  persuade  us  that  our  thought 
has  no  corporeal  existence  but  in  the  mole- 
cules of  the  brain.  Shelley  was  of  opinion 
that  the  "thoughts  which  are  called  real  or 
external  objects"  differed  but  in  regularity 
of  occurrence  from  "hallucinations,  dreams 
and  ideas  of  madmen,"  and  noticed  that  he 
had  dreamed,  therefore  lessening  the  differ- 
ence, "three  several  times  between  intervals 
of  two  or  more  years  the  same  precise  dream." 
If  all  our  mental  images  no  less  than  appari- 
tions (and  I  see  no  reason  to  distinguish)  are 
forms  existing  in  the  general  vehicle  of  Anima 
Mundi,  and  mirrored  in  our  particular  vehicle, 
many  crooked  things  are  made  straight.  I 
am  persuaded  that  a  logical  process,  or  a 
series  of  related  images,  has  body  and  period, 
68 


ANIMA   MUNDI 

and  I  think  of  Anima  Mundi  as  a  great  pool 
or  garden  where  it  spreads  through  allotted 
growth  like  a  great  water  plant  or  branches 
more  fragrantly  in  the  air.  Indeed  as 
Spenser's  Garden  of  Adonis : 

"There  is  the  first  seminary 
Of  all  things  that  are  born  to  live  and  die 
According  to  their  kynds." 

The  soul  by  changes  of  "vital  congruity,'* 
More  says,  draws  to  it  a  certain  thought,  and 
this  thought  draws  by  its  association  the 
sequence  of  many  thoughts,  endowing  them 
with  a  life  in  the  vehicle  meted  out  according 
to  the  intensity  of  the  first  perception.  A 
seed  is  set  growing,  and  this  growth  may  go 
on  apart  from  the  power,  apart  even  from  the 
knowledge  of  the  soul.  If  I  wish  to  "trans- 
fer" a  thought  I  may  think,  let  us  say,  of 
Cinderella's  slipper,  and  my  subject  may  see 
69 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

an  old  woman  coming  out  of  a  chimney; 
or  going  to  sleep  I  may  wish  to  wake  at 
seven  o'clock  and,  though  I  never  think  of 
it  again,  I  shall  wake  upon  the  instant. 
The  thought  has  completed  itself,  certain 
acts  of  logic,  turns,  and  knots  in  the  stem 
have  been  accomplished  out  of  sight  and  out 
of  reach  as  it  were.  We  are  always  starting 
these  parasitic  vegetables  and  letting  them 
coil  beyond  our  knowledge,  and  may  become, 
like  that  lady  in  Balzac  who,  after  a  life  of 
sanctity,  plans  upon  her  deathbed  to  fly  with 
her  renounced  lover.  After  death  a  dream, 
a  desire  she  had  perhaps  ceased  to  believe  in, 
perhaps  ceased  almost  to  remember,  must 
have  recurred  again  and  again  with  its  anguish 
and  its  happiness.  We  can  only  refuse  to 
start  the  wandering  sequence  or,  if  start  it 
does,  hold  it  in  the  intellectual  light  where 
time  gallops,  and  so  keep  it  from  slipping 
70 


ANIMA  MUNDI 

down  into  the  sluggish  vehicle.  The  toil  of 
the  living  is  to  free  themselves  from  an  end- 
less sequence  of  objects,  and  that  of  the  dead 
to  free  themselves  from  an  endless  sequence 
of  thoughts.  One  sequence  begets  another, 
and  these  have  power  because  of  all  those 
things  we  do,  not  for  their  own  sake  but  for 
an  imagined  good. 

VIII 

Spiritism,  whether  of  folklore  or  of  the 
seancfi.  room,  the  visions  of  Swedenborg,  and 
the  speculation  of  the  Platonists  and  Japanese 
plays,  will  have  it  that  we  may  see  at  certain 
roads  and  in  certain  houses  old  murders  acted 
over  again,  and  in  certain  fields  dead  hunts- 
men riding  with  horse  and  hound,  or  ancient 
armies  fighting  above  bones  or  ashes.  We 
carry  to  Anima  Mundi  our  memory,  and  that 
memory  is  for  a  time  our  external  world ;  and 
71 


PER  AMIGA   SILENTIA  LUNAE 

\  all  passionate  moments  recur  again  and  again, 
for  passion  desires  its  own  recurrence  more 
than  any  event,  and  whatever  there  is  of 
corresponding  complacency  or  remorse  is  our 
beginning  of  judgment;  nor  do  we  remember 
only  the  events  of  life,  for  thoughts  bred  of 
longing  and  of  fear,  all  those  parasitic  vege- 
tables that  have  slipped  through  our  fingers, 
come  again  like  a  rope's  end  to  smite  us  upon 
the  face ;  and  as  Cornelius  Agrippa  writes : 
**We  may  dream  ourselves  to  be  consumed 
in  flame  and  persecuted  by  daemons,"  and 
certain  spirits  have  complained  that  they 
would  be  hard  put  to  it  to  arouse  those  who 
died,  believing  they  could  not  awake  till  a 
trumpet  shrilled.  A  ghost  in  a  Japanese 
play  is  set  afire  by  a  fantastic  scruple,  and 
though  a  Buddhist  priest  explains  that  the 
fire  would  go  out  of  itself  if  the  ghost  but 
ceased  to  believe  in  it,  it  cannot  cease  to  be- 
72 


ANIMA  MUNDI 

lieve.  Cornelius  Agrippa  called  such  dream- 
ing souls  hobgoblins,  and  when  Hamlet  re- 
fused the  bare  bodkin  because  of  what  dreams 
may  come,  it  was  from  no  mere  literary  fancy. 
The  soul  can  indeed,  it  appears,  change  these 
objects  built  about  us  by  the  memory,  as  it 
may  change  its  shape;  but  the  greater  the 
change,  the  greater  the  effort  and  the  sooner 
the  return  to  the  habitual  images.  Doubt- 
less in  either  case  the  effort  is  often  beyond 
its  power.  Years  ago  I  was  present  when  a 
woman  consulted  Madame  Blavatsky  for  a 
friend  who  saw  her  newly-dead  husband 
nightly  as  a  decaying  corpse  and  smelt  the 
odour  of  the  grave.  When  he  was  dying, 
said  Madame  Blavatsky,  he  thought  the 
grave  the  end,  and  now  that  he  is  dead  can- 
not throw  off  that  imagination.  A  Brahmin 
once  told  an  actress  friend  of  mine  that  he 
disliked  acting,  because  if  a  man  died  play- 
73 


PER  AMIGA   SILENTIA  LUNAE 

ing  Hamlet,  he  would  be  Hamlet  in  eternity. 
Yet  after  a  time  the  soul  partly  frees  itself 
and  becomes  "the  shape  changer"  of  the 
legends,  and  can  cast,  like  the  mediaeval 
magician,  what  illusions  it  would.  There  is 
an  Irish  countryman  in  one  of  Lady  Gregory's 
books  who  had  eaten  with  a  stranger  on  the 
road,  and  some  while  later  vomited,  to  dis- 
cover he  had  but  eaten  chopped  up  grass. 
One  thinks,  too,  of  the  spirits  that  show  them- 
selves in  the  images  of  wild  creatures. 

IX 

The  dead,  as  the  passionate  necessity  wears 
out,  come  into  a  measure  of  freedom  and  may 
turn  the  impulse  of  events,  started  while 
living,  in  some  new  direction,  but  they  can- 
not originate  except  through  the  living.  Then 
gradually  they  perceive,  although  they  are 
still  but  living  in  their  memories,  harmonies, 
74 


ANIMA  MUNDI 

symbols,  and  patterns,  as  though  all  were 
being  refashioned  by  an  artist,  and  they  are 
moved  by  emotions,  sweet  for  no  imagined 
good  but  in  themselves,  like  those  of  children 
dancing  in  a  ring;  and  I  do  not  doubt  that 
they  make  love  in  that  union  which  Sweden- 
borg  has  said  is  of  the  whole  body  and  seems 
from  far  off  an  incandescence.  Hitherto 
shade  has  communicated  with  shade  in  mo- 
ments of  common  memory  that  recur  like  the 
figures  of  a  dance  in  terror  or  in  joy,  but  now 
they  run  together  like  to  like,  and  their 
Covens  and  Fleets  have  rhythm  and  pattern. 
This  running  together  and  running  of  all  to  a 
centre  and  yet  without  loss  of  identity,  has 
been  prepared  for  by  their  exploration  of 
their  moral  life,  of  its  beneficiaries  and  its 
victims,  and  even  of  all  its  untrodden  paths, 
and  all  their  thoughts  have  moulded  the 
vehicle  and  become  event  and  circumstance. 
75 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

X 

There  are  two  realities,  the  terrestrial  and 
the  condition  of  fire.  All  power  is  from  the 
terrestrial  condition,  for  there  all  opposites 
meet  and  there  only  is  the  extreme  of  choice 
possible,  full  freedom.  And  there  the  hetero- 
geneous is,  and  evil,  for  evil  is  the  strain  one 
upon  another  of  opposites ;  but  in  the  con- 
dition of  fire  is  all  music  and  all  rest.  Be- 
tween is  the  condition  of  air  where  images 
have  but  a  borrowed  life,  that  of  memory  or 
that  reflected  upon  them  when  they  sym- 
bolise colours  and  intensities  of  fire,  the  place 
of  shades  who  are  "in  the  whirl  of  those  who 
are  fading,"  and  who  cry  like  those  amorous 
shades  in  the  Japanese  play : 

"That  we  may  acquire  power 
Even  in  our  faint  substance. 
We  will  show  forth  even  now, 
76 


ANIMA  MUNDI 

And  though  it  be  but  in  a  dream, 
Our  form  of  repentance." 

After  so  many  rhythmic  beats  the  soul 
must  cease  to  desire  its  images,  and  can,  as 
it  were,  close  its  eyes. 

When  all  sequence  comes  to  an  end,  time 
comes  to  an  end,  and  the  soul  puts  on  the 
rhythmic  or  spiritual  body  or  luminous  body 
and  contemplates  all  the  events  of  its  memory 
and  every  possible  impulse  in  an  eternal 
possession  of  itself  in  one  single  moment. 
That  condition  is  alone  animate,  all  the  rest 
is  phantasy,  and  from  thence  come  all  the 
passions,  and  some  have  held,  the  very  heat 
of  the  body. 

Time  drops  in  decay, 

Like  a  candle  burnt  out. 

And  the  mountains  and  the  woods 

Have  their  day,  have  their  day. 

77 


PER  AMIGA   SILENTIA  LUNAE 

What  one,  in  the  rout 
Of  the  fire-born  moods. 
Has  fallen  away  ? 

XI 

The  soul  cannot  have  much  knowledge  till 
it  has  shaken  off  the  habit  of  time  and  of 
place,  but  till  that  hour  it  must  fix  its  atten- 
tion upon  what  is  near,  thinking  of  objects 
one  after  another  as  we  run  the  eye  or  the 
finger  over  them.  Its  intellectual  power  can- 
not but  increase  and  alter  as  its  perceptions 
grow  simultaneous.  Yet  even  now  we  seem 
at  moments  to  escape  from  time  in  what  we 
call  prevision,  and  from  place  when  we  see 
distant  things  in  a  dream  and  in  concurrent 
dreams.  A  couple  of  years  ago,  while  in 
meditation,  my  head  seemed  surrounded  by 
a  conventional  sun's  rays,  and  when  I  went 
to  bed  I  had  a  long  dream  of  a  woman  with 
78 


ANIMA   MUNDI 

her  hair  on  fire.  I  awoke  and  lit  a  candle, 
and  discovered  presently  from  the  odour  that 
in  doing  so  I  had  set  my  own  hair  on  fire.  I 
dreamed  very  lately  that  I  was  writing  a 
story,  and  at  the  same  time  I  dreamed  that 
I  was  one  of  the  characters  in  that  story  and 
seeking  to  touch  the  heart  of  some  girl  in 
defiance  of  the  author's  intention;  and  con- 
currently with  all  that,  I  was  as  another  self 
trying  to  strike  with  the  button  of  a  foil  a 
great  china  jar.  The  obscurity  of  the  pro- 
phetic books  of  William  Blake,  which  were 
composed  in  a  state  of  vision,  comes  almost 
wholly  from  these  concurrent  dreams.  Every- 
body has  some  story  or  some  experience  of  the 
sudden  knowledge  in  sleep  or  waking  of  some 
event,  a  misfortune  for  the  most  part  hap- 
pening to  some  friend  far  off. 


79 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

'    XII 

The  dead  living  in  their  memories,  are,  I 
am  persuaded,  the  source  of  all  that  we  call 
instinct,  and  it  is  their  love  and  their  desire, 
all  unknowing,  that  make  us  drive  beyond 
our  reason,  or  in  defiance  of  our  interest  it 
may  be;  and  it  is  the  dream  martens  that, 
all  unknowing,  are  master-masons  to  the  liv- 
ing martens  building  about  church  windows 
their  elaborate  nests;  and  in  their  turn,  the 
phantoms  are  stung  to  a  keener  delight  from  a 
concord  between  their  luminous  pure  vehicle 
and  our  strong  senses.  It  were  to  reproach 
the  power  or  the  beneficence  of  God,  to  be- 
lieve those  children  of  Alexander  who  died 
wretchedly  could  not  throw  an  urnful  to  the 
heap,  nor  that  Gaesarea  ^  murdered  in  child- 
hood, whom  Gleopatra  bore  to  Gaesar,  nor 

*  I  have  no  better  authority  for  Caesarea  than  Landor's  play. 

80 


ANIMA  MUNDI 

that  so  brief-lived  younger  Pericles  Aspasia 
bore  being  so  nobly  born. 

XIII 

Because  even  the  most  wise  dead  can  but 
arrange  their  memories  as  we  arrange  pieces 
upon  a  chess-board  and  obey  remembered 
words  alone,  he  who  would  turn  magician 
is  forbidden  by  the  Zoroastrian  oracle  to 
change  *' barbarous  words"  of  invocation. 
Communication  with  Anima  Mundi  is  through 
the  association  of  thoughts  or  images  or  ob- 
jects; and  the  famous  dead  and  those  of 
whom  but  a  faint  memory  lingers,  can  still 
—  and  it  is  for  no  other  end  that,  all  un- 
knowing, we  value  posthumous  fame  —  tread 
the  corridor  and  take  the  empty  chair.  A 
glove  or  a  name  can  call  their  bearer;  the 
shadows  come  to  our  elbow  amid  their  old 
undisturbed  habitations,  and  *'materialisa- 
G  81 


PER  AMIGA   SILENTIA  LUNAE 

tion'*  itself  is  easier,  it  may  be,  among  walls, 
or  by  rocks  and  trees,  that  carry  upon  them 
particles  the  vehicles  cast  off  in  some  ex- 
tremity while  they  had  still  animate  bodies. 
Certainly  the  mother  returns  from  the 
grave,  and  with  arms  that  may  be  visible  and 
solid,  for  a  hurried  moment,  can  comfort  a 
neglected  child  or  set  the  cradle  rocking ;  and 
in  all  ages  men  have  known  and  aflSrmed 
that  when  the  soul  is  troubled,  those  that  are 

a  shade  and  a  song : 

*'live  there. 

And  live  like  winds  of  light  on  dark  or  stormy 
air." 

XIV 
Awhile  they  live  again  those  passionate 
moments,  not  knowing  they  are  dead,  and 
then  they  know  and  may  awake  or  half  awake 
to  be  our  visitors.  How  is  their  dream 
changed  as  Time  drops  away  and  their  senses 
82 


ANIMA  MUNDI 

multiply?  Does  their  stature  alter,  do  their 
eyes  grow  more  brilliant?  Certainly  the 
dreams  stay  the  longer,  the  greater  their 
passion  when  alive :  Helen  may  still  open 
her  chamber  door  to  Paris  or  watch  him  from 
the  wall,  and  know  she  is  dreaming  but  be- 
cause nights  and  days  are  poignant  or  the 
stars  unreckonably  bright.  Surely  of  the 
passionate  dead  we  can  but  cry  in  words  Ben 
Jonson  meant  for  none  but  Shakespeare: 
"So  rammed"  are  they  "with  life  they  can 
but  grow  in  life  with  being." 

XV 

The  inflowing  from  their  mirrored  life, 
who  themselves  receive  it  from  the  Con- 
dition of  Fire,  falls  upon  the  Winding  Path 
called  the  Path  of  the  Serpent,  and  that  in- 
flowing coming  alike  to  men  and  to  animals 
is  called  natural.  There  is  another  inflow 
83 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

which  is  not  natural  but  intellectual,  and  is 
from  the  fire;  and  it  descends  through  souls 
who  pass  for  a  lengthy  or  a  brief  period  out 
of  the  mirror  life,  as  we  in  sleep  out  of  the 
bodily  life,  and  though  it  may  fall  upon  a 
sleeping  serpent,  it  falls  principally  upon 
straight  paths.  In  so  far  as  a  man  is  like  all 
other  men,  the  inflow  finds  him  upon  the 
winding  path,  and  in  so  far  as  he  is  a  saint  or 
sage,  upon  the  straight  path. 

XVI 

f  Daemon  and  man  are  opposites;  man 
passes  from  heterogeneous  objects  to  the 
simplicity  of  fire,  and  the  Daemon  is  drawn 
to  objects  because  through  them  he  obtains 
power,  the  extremity  of  choice.  For  only 
in  men's  minds  can  he  meet  even  those  in 
the  Condition  of  Fire  who  are  not  of  his  own 
kin.  He,  by  using  his  mediatorial  shades, 
84. 


ANIMA   MUNDI 

brings  man  again  and  again  to  the  place  of 
choice,  heightening  temptation  that  the  choice 
may  be  as  final  as  possible,  imposing  his  own 
lucidity  upon  events,  leading  his  victim  to 
whatever  among  works  not  impossible  is  the 
most  diflBcult.  He  suffers  with  man  as  some 
firm-souled  man  suffers  with  the  woman  he 
but  loves  the  better  because  she  is  extrava- 
gant and  fickle.  His  descending  power  is 
neither  the  winding  nor  the  straight  line  but 
zigzag,  illuminating  the  passive  and  active 
properties,  the  tree's  two  sorts  of  fruit:  it 
is  the  sudden  lightning,  for  all  his  acts  of 
power  are  instantaneous.  We  perceive  in  a 
pulsation    of    the    artery,    and    after    slowly 

decline. 

XVII 

Each  Daemon  is  drawn  to  whatever  man 
or,  if  its  nature  is  more  general,  to  whatever 
nation  it  most  differs  from,  and  it  shapes  into 
85 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

its  own  image  the  antithetical  dream  of  man 
or  nation.  The  Jews  had  already  shown  by 
the  precious  metals,  by  the  ostentatious  wealth 
of  Solomon's  temple,  the  passion  that  has 
made  them  the  money-lenders  of  the  modern 
world.  If  they  had  not  been  rapacious,  lust- 
ful, narrow  and  persecuting  beyond  the  people 
of  their  time,  the  incarnation  had  been  im- 
possible; but  it  was  an  intellectual  impulse 
from  the  Condition  of  Fire  that  shaped  their 
antithetical  self  into  that  of  the  classic  world. 
So  always  it  is  an  impulse  from  some  Daemon 
\  that  gives  to  our  vague,  unsatisfied  desire, 
beauty,  a  meaning  and  a  form  all  can  accept. 

XVIII 

Only  in  rapid  and  subtle  thought,  or  in 

I  faint  accents  heard  in  the  quiet  of  the  mind, 

can  the  thought  of  the  spirit  come  to  us  but 

little  changed;    for  a  mind,  that  grasps  ob- 

86 


ANIMA   MUNDI 

jects  simultaneously  according  to  the  degree 
of  its  liberation,  does  not  think  the  same  ^ 
thought  with  the  mind  that  sees  objects  one 
after  another.  The  purpose  of  most  reli- 
gious teaching,  of  the  insistence  upon  the  sub- 
mission to  God's  will  above  all,  is  to  make 
certain  of  the  passivity  of  the  vehicle  where 
it  is  most  pure  and  most  tenuous.  When 
we  are  passive  where  the  vehicle  is  coarse,  we 
become  mediumistic,  and  the  spirits  who 
mould  themselves  in  that  coarse  vehicle  can 
only  rarely  and  with  great  difficulty  speak 
their  own  thoughts  and  keep  their  own 
memory.  They  are  subject  to  a  kind  of 
drunkenness  and  are  stupefied,  old  writers 
said,  as  if  with  honey,  and  readily  mistake 
our  memory  for  their  own,  and  believe  them- 
selves whom  and  what  we  please.  We  be- 
wilder and  overmaster  them,  for  once  they 
are  among  the  perceptions  of  successive  ob- 
87 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

jects,  our  reason,  being  but  an  instrument 
created  and  sharpened  by  those  objects,  is 
stronger  than  their  intellect,  and  they  can 
but  repeat  with  brief  glimpses  from  another 
state,  our  knowledge  and  our  words. 

XIX 

A  friend  once  dreamed  that  she  saw  many 
dragons  climbing  upon  the  steep  side  of  a 
cliff    and    continually    falling.     Henry    More 
thought  that  those  who,   after  centuries  of 
life,  failed  to  find  the  rhythmic  body  and  to 
pass  into  the  Condition  of  Fire,  were  born 
again.     Edmund    Spenser,    who   was    among 
More's  masters,  affirmed  that  nativity  with- 
out giving  it  a  cause  : 
"After  that  they  againe  retourned  beene. 
They  in  that  garden  planted  be  agayne. 
And  grow  afresh,  as  they  had  never  scene 
Fleshy  corruption,  nor  mortal  payne. 
88 


ANIMA  MUNDI 

Some    thousand   years   so   doen   they    ther 

remayne, 
And  then  of  him  are  clad  with  other  hew. 
Or  sent  into  the  chaungeful  world  agayne. 
Till  thither  they  retourn  where  first  they 

grew: 
So  like  a  wheele,  around  they  roam  from  old 

to  new." 

The  dead  who  speak  to  us  deny  metem- 
psychosis, perhaps  because  they  but  know  a 
little  better  what  they  knew  alive;  while  the 
dead  in  Asia,  for  perhaps  no  better  reason, 
affirm  it,  and  so  we  are  left  amid  plausibil- 
ities and  uncertainties. 

XX 

But  certainly  it  is  always  to  the  Condition 

of  Fire,  where  emotion  is  not  brought  to  any 

sudden  stop,  where  there  is  neither  wall  nor 

gate,   that   we   would   rise;     and   the   mask 

89 


PER  AMIGA   SILENTIA  LUNAE 

plucked  from  the  oak-tree  is  but  my  imagi- 
nation of  rhythmic  body.  We  may  pray 
to  that  last  condition  by  any  name  so  long 
as  we  do  not  pray  to  it  as  a  thing  or  a  thought, 
and  most  prayers  call  it  man  or  woman  or 
child : 

"For  mercy  has  a  human  heart, 
Pity  a  human  face." 

Within  ourselves  Reason  and  Will,  who 
are  the  man  and  woman,  hold  out  towards  a 
hidden  altar,  a  laughing  or  crying  child. 

XXI 

When  I  remember  that  Shelley  calls  our 
minds  "mirrors  of  the  fire  for  which  all  thirst," 
I  cannot  but  ask  the  question  all  have  asked, 
"What  or  who  has  cracked  the  mirror.?"  I 
begin  to  study  the  only  self  that  I  can  know, 
myself,  and  to  wind  the  thread  upon  the 
perne  again. 

90 


ANIMA  MUNDI 

At  certain  moments,  always  unforeseen,  I 
become  happy,  most  commonly  when  at 
hazard  I  have  opened  some  book  of  verse. 
Sometimes  it  is  my  own  verse  when,  instead 
of  discovering  new  technical  flaws,  I  read  with 
all  the  excitement  of  the  first  writing.  Per- 
haps I  am  sitting  in  some  crowded  restaurant, 
the  open  book  beside  me,  or  closed,  my  ex- 
citement having  over-brimmed  the  page.  I 
look  at  the  strangers  near  as  if  I  had  known 
them  all  my  life,  and  it  seems  strange  that 
I  cannot  speak  to  them :  everything  fills 
me  with  affection,  I  have  no  longer  any  fears 
or  any  needs;  I  do  not  even  remember  that 
this  happy  mood  must  come  to  an  end.  It 
seems  as  if  the  vehicle  had  suddenly  grown 
pure  and  far  extended  and  so  luminous  that 
one  half  imagines  that  the  images  from  Anima 
Mundi,  embodied  there  and  drunk  with  that 
sweetness,  would,  as  some  country  drunkard 
91 


PER  AMIGA   SILENTIA  LUNAE 

who  had  thrown  a  wisp  into  his  own  thatch, 
burn  up  time. 

It  may  be  an  hour  before  the  mood  passes, 
but  latterly  I  seem  to  understand  that  I 
enter  upon  it  the  moment  I  cease  to  hate.  I 
think  the  common  condition  of  our  life  is 
hatred  —  I  know  that  this  is  so  with  me  — 
irritation  with  public  or  private  events  or 
persons.  There  is  no  great  matter  in  for- 
getfulness  of  servants,  or  the  delays  of  trades- 
men, but  how  forgive  the  ill-breeding  of 
Carlyle,  or  the  rhetoric  of  Swinburne,  or 
that  woman  who  murmurs  over  the  dinner- 
table  the  opinion  of  her  daily  paper  .f*  And 
only  a  week  ago  last  Sunday,  I  hated  the 
spaniel  who  disturbed  a  partridge  on  her 
nest,  a  trout  who  took  my  bait  and  yet  broke 
away  unhooked.  The  books  say  that  our 
happiness  comes  from  the  opposite  of  hate, 
but  I  am  not  certain,  for  we  may  love  un- 
92 


ANIMA  MUNDI 

happily.  And  plainly,  when  I  have  closed 
a  book  too  stirred  to  go  on  reading,  and  in 
those  brief  intense  visions  of  sleep,  I  have 
something  about  me  that,  though  it  makes 
me  love,  is  more  like  innocence.  I  am  in 
the  place  where  the  daemon  is,  but  I  do  not 
think  he  is  with  me  until  I  begin  to  make  a 
new  personality,  selecting  among  those  images, 
seeking  always  to  satisfy  a  hunger  grown  out 
of  conceit  with  daily  diet ;  and  yet  as  I  write 
the  words,  "I  select,"  I  am  full  of  uncertainty, 
not  knowing  when  I  am  the  finger,  when  the 
clay.  Once,  twenty  years  ago,  I  seemed  to  1 
awake  from  sleep  to  find  my  body  rigid,  and 
to  hear  a  strange  voice  speaking  these  words 
through  my  lips  as  through  lips  of  stone : 
"We  make  an  image  of  him  who  sleeps,  and 
it  is  not  him  who  sleeps,  and  we  call  it  Em- 
manuel." 


93 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

XXII 

As  I  go  up  and  down  my  stair  and  pass  the 
gilded  Moorish  wedding-chest  where  I  keep 
my  "barbarous  words,"  I  wonder  will  I  take 
to  them  once  more,  for  I  am  baJEBed  by  those 
voices  that  still  speak  as  to  Odysseus  but  as 
the  bats;  or  now  that  I  shall  in  a  little  be 
growing  old,  to  some  kind  of  simple  piety 
like  that  of  an  old  woman. 

May  9,  1917. 


94 


EPILOGUE 

My  Dear  "Maurice"  —  I  was  often  in 
France  before  you  were  born  or  when  you 
were  but  a  little  child.  WTien  I  went  for  the 
first  or  second  time  Mallarme  had  just  written  : 
"All  our  age  is  full  of  the  trembling  of  the 
veil  of  the  temple."  One  met  everywhere 
young  men  of  letters  who  talked  of  magic. 
A  distinguished  English  man  of  letters  asked 
me  to  call  with  him  on  Stanislas  de  Gaeta 
because  he  did  not  dare  go  alone  to  that  mys- 
terious house.  I  met  from  time  to  time  with 
the  German  poet  Doukenday,  a  grave  Swede 
whom  I  only  discovered  after  years  to  have 
been  Strindberg,  then  looking  for  the  philos- 
opher's stone  in  a  lodging  near  the  Luxem- 
bourg; and  one  day  in  the  chambers  of 
95 


PER  AMIGA  SILENTIA  LUNAE 

Stuart  Merrill  the  poet,  I  spoke  with  a  young 
Arabic  scholar  who  displayed  a  large,  roughly- 
made  gold  ring  which  had  grown  to  the  shape 
of  his  finger.  Its  gold  had  no  hardening  alloy, 
he  said,  because  it  was  made  by  his  master, 
a  Jewish  Rabbi,  of  alchemical  gold.  My 
critical  mind  —  was  it  friend  or  enemy  ?  — 
mocked,  and  yet  I  was  delighted.  Paris  was 
as  legendary  as  Connaught.  This  new  pride, 
that  of  the  adept,  was  added  to  the  pride  of 
the  artist.  Villiers  de  L'Isle  Adam,  the 
haughtiest  of  men,  had  but  lately  died.  I 
had  read  his  Axel  slowly  and  laboriously  as 
one  reads  a  sacred  book  —  my  French  was 
very  bad  —  and  had  applauded  it  upon  the 
stage.  As  I  could  not  follow  the  spoken 
words,  I  was  not  bored  even  where  Axel  and 
the  Commander  discussed  philosophy  for  a 
half-hour  instead  of  beginning  their  duel.  If 
I  felt  impatient  it  was  only  that  they  delayed 
96 


EPILOGUE 

the  coming  of  the  adept  Janus,  for  I  hoped  to 
recognise  the  moment  when  Axel  cries:  "I 
know  that  lamp,  it  was  burning  before  Solo- 
mon"; or  that  other  when  he  cries:  "As 
for  living,  our  servants  will  do  that  for  us." 

The  movement  of  letters  had  been  haughty- 
even  before  Magic  had  touched  it.  Rim- 
baud had  sung:  "Am  I  an  old  maid  that  I 
should  fear  the  embrace  of  death?"  And 
everywhere  in  Paris  and  in  London  young 
men  boasted  of  the  garret,  and  claimed  to 
have  no  need  of  what  the  crowd  values. 

Last  summer  you,  who  were  at  the  age  I 
was  when  first  I  heard  of  Mallarme  and  of 
Verlaine,  spoke  much  of  the  French  poets 
young  men  and  women  read  to-day.  Claudel 
I  already  somewhat  knew,  but  you  read  to 
me  for  the  first  time  from  Jammes  a  dialogue 
between  a  poet  and  a  bird,  that  made  us  cry, 
and  a  whole  volume  of  Peguy's  Mystere  de 
H  97 


PER  AMIGA   SILENTIA  LUNAE 

la  Charite  de  Jeanne  d'Arc.  Nothing  re- 
mained the  same  but  the  preoccupation  with 
rehgion,  for  these  poets  submitted  every- 
thing to  the  Pope,  and  all,  even  Claudel,  a 
proud  oratorical  man,  affirmed  that  they  saw 
the  world  with  the  eyes  of  vine-dressers  and 
charcoal-burners.  It  was  no  longer  the  soul, 
self -moving  and  self -teaching  —  the  magical 
soul  —  but  Mother  France  and  Mother 
Church. 

Have  not  my  thoughts  run  through  a  like 
round,  though  I  have  not  found  my  tradition 
in  the  Catholic  Church,  which  was  not  the 
church  of  my  childhood,  but  where  the  tra- 
dition is,   as  I  believe,   more  universal  and 

more  ancient  ? 

W.  B.  Y. 

May  11,  1917. 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  Amerioa. 

98 


'HE  following  pages  contain  advertisements  of 
books  by  the  same  author  or  on  kindred  subjects 


Responsibilities 


By   WILLIAM   BUTLER   YEATS 

Cloth,  $r.2j 

"  William   Butler  Yeats   is  by  far  the  biggest 

poetic  personality  living   among   us   at   present. 

He  is  great  both  as  a  lyric  and  dramatist  poet." 

— /ohn  Mase/Uld. 

"  This  poetry  has  the  rhythm  that  is  incantation 
and  sorcery,  that  is  not  of  the  senses  nor  of  the 
spirit,  but  of  a  mingling  which  is  exaltation." 

—  Chicago  Evenmg  Post. 

Under  the  title  of  "Responsibilities"  William 
Butler  Yeats  brings  together  some  of  his  recent 
poems.  Notable  still  for  his  freshness  of  thought, 
his  keen  originality,  and  his  purely  poetic  conception 
of  thoughts  and  facts,  Mr,  Yeats  sometimes  makes 
us  wonder  how  he  has  so  long  been  able  to  hold 
his  style  above  the  ever  rising  level  of  modern 
poetry.  No  man  stands  so  apart  in  his  own  perfec- 
tion as  does  this  Irish  poet  and  playwright,  in  his 
art  of  discovering  truths  remote  and  beautiful. 
Serious,  vital  thoughts  he  veils,  as  the  genuine  poet, 
in  a  cloak  of  fine  rhythmical  expression. 

It  is,  after  all,  as  a  poet  that  the  majority  of 
people  like  to  think  of  Mr.  Yeats,  and  this  splendid 
collection,  the  first  in  a  number  of  years,  is  assured 
of  a  warm  welcome. 


THE   MACMILLAN   COMPANY 

Pablishers  64-66  Fifth  Avenue  New  Tork 


BY  WILLIAM    BUTLER  YEATS 

The  Cutting  of  an  Agate 

12mo,  $1.50 
"Mr.  Yeats  is  probably  the  most  important  as  well 
as  the  most  widely  known  of  the  men  concerned  directly 
in  the  so-called  Celtic  renaissance.  More  than  this, 
he  stands  among  the  few  men  to  be  reckoned  with  in 
modern  poetry." — New  York  Herald. 

The  Green  Helmet  and  Other  Poems 

Decorated  cloth,  12mo,  SI. 25 
The  initial  piece  in  this  volume  is  a  deUciously  con- 
ceived heroic  farce,  quaint  in  humor  and  sprightly  in 
action.  It  tells  of  the  difficulty  in  which  two  simple 
Irish  folk  find  themselves  when  they  enter  into  an 
agreement  with  an  apparition  of  the  sea,  who  demands 
that  they  knock  off  his  head  and  who  maintains  that 
after  they  have  done  that  he  will  knock  off  theirs. 
There  is  a  real  meaning  in  the  play  which  it  will  not 
take  the  thoughtful  reader  long  to  discover.  Besides 
this  there  are  a  number  of  shorter  poems,  notably  one 
in  which  Mr.  Yeats  answers  the  critics  of  "The  Play- 
boy of  the  Western  World." 

Lyrical  and  Dramatic  Poems 

In  Two  Volimies 

Vol.  I.  Lyrical  Poems,  $2.00    Leather,  $2.25 

Vol.  II.  Plays  (Revised),  $2.00    Leather,  $2.25 

The  two-volume  edition  of  the  Irish  poet's  works 

included  everything  he  has  done  in  verse  up  to  the 

present  time.     The  first  volume  contains  his  lyrics; 

the  second  includes  all  of  his  five  dramas  in  verse; 

"The   Countess   Cathleen,"    "The    Land   of   Heart's 

Desire,"  "The  King's  Threshold,"  " On  Baile's  Strand," 

and  "The  Shadowy  Waters." 


THE    MACMILLAN    COMPANY 

Publishers         64-66  Fifth  Avenue         New  York 


BY  WILLIAM   BUTLER  YEATS 

Reveries  Over  Childhood  and  Youth 

S2.00 
In  this  book  the  celebrated  Irish  author  gives  us  his 
reminiscences  of  his  childhood  and  youth.  The  mem- 
ories are  written,  as  is  to  be  expected,  in  charming  prose. 
They  have  the  appeal  invariably  attached  to  the  ac- 
count of  a  sensitive  childhood. 


The  Hour  Glass  and  Other  Plays  $1.25 

"The  Hour  Glass"  is  one  of  Mr.  Yeats'  noble  and 
effective  plays,  and  with  the  other  plays  in  the  volume, 
make  a  small,  but  none  the  less  representative  collec- 
tion.   

Stories  of  Red  Hanrahan  $1.25 

These  tales  belong  to  the  realm  of  pure  lyrical  ex- 
pression. They  are  mysterious  and  shadowy,  fuU  of 
infinite  subtleties  and  old  wisdom  of  folklore,  and  sad 
with  the  gray  wistful  Celtic  sadness. 

"  Lovers  of  Mr.  Yeats's  suggestive  and  delicate  writ- 
ing will  find  him  at  his  best  in  this  volume." — Spring- 
field Republican. 

Ideas  of  Good  and  Evil  st.50 

Essays  on  art  and  life,  wherein  are  set  forth  much  of 
Yeats'  philosophy,  his  love  of  beauty,  his  hope  for 
Ireland  and  for  Irish  artistic  achievement. 


The  Celtic  Twilight  $ijo 

A  collection  of  tales  from  Irish  life  and  of  Irish  fancy, 
retold  from  peasants'  stories  with  no  additions  except 
an  occasional  comment. 


THE    MACMILLAN    COMPANY 

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THE  WORKS  OF  RABINDRANATH  TAGORE 
BOLPUR  EDITION 


HUNGRY   STONES   AND   OTHER    STORIES. 

FRUIT   GATHERING. 

CHITRA:     A    Play    in    one    act. 

THE   CRESCENT    MOON:     Child    Poems. 

THE    GARDENER:     Love    Poems. 

GITANJALI:     Religious    Poems. 

THE  KING  OF  THE  DARK  CHAMBER:    A  Play. 

THE  SONGS  OF  KABIR. 

SADHANA:     The    Realization   of    Life. 

THE    POST    OFFICE:     A    Play. 

Each  volume  decorated  cloth,  $1.50;  leather,  $2.00, 
This  new  edition  of  the  works  of  Rabindranath  Tagore  will 
recommend  itself  to  those  who  desire  to  possess  the  various 
poems  and  plays  of  the  great  Hindu  writer  in  the  best  possible 
printings  and  bindings.  Great  care  has  been  taken  with  the 
physical  appearance  of  the  books.  In  addition  to  the  special 
design  that  has  been  made  fot  the  cover,  there  are  special  end 
papers  and  decorated  title  pages  in  each  book.  Altogether  this 
edition  promises  to  become  the  standard  one  of  this  distin- 
guished  poet  and   seer. 


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